[tenacious_tuna]

I'm an American living outside the US. While this is true it feels a bit like how pedestrians have the right-of-way at road crossings: you're legally protected, but is right now the time to test how much people are going to respect that?

I crossed the US-Canada land border with a non-US friend to go to a birthday party a while back; they sent us to secondary so my friend could get their passport stamped (their previous visa had run out). CBP took the opportunity to search our car and tried to convince us they found weed before letting us go (neither of us use it).

Another time my wife and I (both citizens) were crossing and the border agent gave us a hard time for having different last names.

I can't imagine what it's like for people with less privilege than I, but I'm already to the point where I stress about crossing the border. I bring a spare phone, wiped of anything interesting, I let my partners know when I'm at the crossing in case something happens; Paranoid? Possibly. But the potentiality of something going horribly wrong is through the roof, and there's increasingly little recourse. Yes, citizens especially should be insulated from this, but we're seeing egregious violations on so many fronts I don't want to trust that to hold.